By Tony Attwood
Previously in this series about Dylan songs that have changed my life, I wrote about
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My earlier article Bob Dylan in 1976: a year of pause and reflection, noted that Bob only wrote one song that year, and it would seem a bit silly of me to nominate that one song as the song of the year.
But this fact does help remind us of the erratic nature of Bob’s writing. He wrote 17 songs in 1975 and seven songs in 1977, so he clearly hadn’t given up altogether – rather, he was just having a bit of a break. And why not?
And I think many people can see the value of that break, through the quality of “Where are you tonight?” just from the opening line…
There’s a long-distance train rolling through the rain,
tears on the letter I write.
There are a number of Dylan songs where each line is a song in itself, each with its own meaning, and each with an image so powerful that it doesn’t matter what the rest of the song is about; we can still hang onto that one line.
And here I get the impression that Bob likes to use the images of highways, rail tracks and travel to signify a change of mood or a new way of thinking – after all, one album was named after a highway – so the train is a shortcut to this notion of change.
And that thought came to me, if not at the first moment of hearing this track, then pretty soon thereafter.
Now I have touched on this issue several times, so if you are getting used to the theme, please do excuse me, but I will try to explore it in a slightly different way this time. I was brought up as an only child, living in a small flat (apartment) in north London. And although being in a city, my parents were not highly sociable, in that they did not give or attend parties. The people I got to know were those children with whom I was at school, my grandparents and a couple of children of a similar age who lived in the same block of flats.
Thus, I grew up in a strange contradiction of being in a densely populated city, but not having large numbers of friends. And this was a key element in my thinking when I first heard “Where are you tonight?” many years later. Where were my few friends from those early years of my life?
Thus on hearing this song, I had no thoughts of Bob singing about Sara and her attempt to take the children away from Bob – my thoughts were based on my own reflections on my childhood, and moving from a London that had just about recovered from the second world war into what many would see as a rural idyll, just a short distance from the largest natural harbour in the northern hemisphere (beaten to the world crown for that attribute only by Sydnety Harbour, by which, coincidentally, my youngest daughter now livese).
But I was also affected by the fact that I was an only child (I knew nothing of my brother until a few years ago, by which time I was well into my 70s), living in an environment I found totally strange, going to a new school where most of the other children I met already had their own friendship groups from their years in primary school.
Of course, this has nothing to do with Bob’s song – but when many years later I came to hear “Where are you tonight?” I was instantly transported back into myself as a lost 11-year-old with no brothers and sisters, and no local streets or parks that I knew, and no friends. So I wrote regular letters back to my friends left behind in London. I am not sure there were tears on the letters, but there was a deeper sadness within me than I had ever known before.
Now none of this was a “life changing experience” of the type I have been writing about in the series of that name, but rather this was a way of coming to terms with the life-changing experience that had already happened; that experience of my mother, father and myself moving from a tiny flat in the heart of north London, or a much more spacious bungalow, with a garden close to the sea in rural Dorset on England’s south coast.
In London, I had my best pal living five minutes’ walk away, just down the street. Opposite the flat was a playing field with swings, slides, roundabouts etc and there I met my school friends. But then suddenly in Dorset, I was friendless.
And it was not until I listened to “Journey” that I started to resolve those feelings that I had had 20 years earlier when my family moved from London to Dorset.
Now, of course, my family moving from a war-torn urban environment to a rural environment when I was aged 11 has nothing to do with Bob – obviously, he doesn’t know I exist, let alone know anything about my personal trials and tribulations as a child. But the intensity of the lyrics of this song, and the appropriateness of the musical accompaniment, immediately made me think about the trauma (if I may call it that) that engulfed me as we moved from post-war London to rural Dorset. And for the first time, 20 years beyond that massive change in my life as an 11-year-old, I found a way of finally coming to terms with those events and those emotions.
And I find this important because it is self-evident that Bob was writing about a totally different journey and a totally different set of changes in his life. But even so, when I heard “Where are you tonight?” I interpreted that line as being about myself as an 11-year-old. I was asking, what happened to my former self, brought up in post-war north London, now a man with a wife and a child and a second on the way.
I really can’t describe how deeply that “where are you tonight?” phrase affected me, but I can say it was for me a case of asking myself about myself, about my life, whether it had been a success, whether I was a good father and husband, whether I was a successful writer….
Of course, in such deep thoughts, not every line of a song is relevant, but when I heard that “The truth was obscure,” I knew that I was still working my way towards the real me – the me that I felt somehow existed but was still locked away in myself. A self that was constantly “sacrificed”. For although I never really felt I was a “strong man” most certainly in terms of my attempts to make a career out of being a writer, I was indeed “betitled by doubt.”
Of course, not every line in the song has relevance to my own journey through life – but that’s not the point. The point is that somehow Bob managed to include SOME lines that were relevant when I first heard them and have remained relevant through much of my life.
As a person who, through much of his life, wanted to be a writer, but was told in the early days that such a dream was quite ludicrous, as I couldn’t spell, and anyway, his thoughts were all over the place, I was of course dissuaded. But when heard
There's a lion in the road, there's a demon escaped There's a million dreams gone, there's a landscape being raped
I felt that somehow Bob knew me, and my determination returned. I would be a writer.
Now you might well say (if you have battled this far through my personal recollections) “Well, lots of us get that with Bob’s songs, ” I would not deny that point at all. I am not claiming to be unique, and certainly not the inheritor of one per cent of Bob’s genius. I’m just a guy who wrote a fair number of books, and (more to the point financially) found I could write advertisements that actually made some who read them go and buy the product or service. That gave me a good living and a good income, but is hardly worth shouting about when considering the work of a genius such as Bob Dylan.
But I am fascinated, as I look back, at how I can instantly feel that certain songs and certain lines resonated so strongly with me when I first heard them, and went on to give me strength and hope. So as I read or listen to the lines…
"There's a white diamond gloom on the dark side of this room and a pathway that leads up to the stars; If you don't believe there's a price for this sweet paradise, just remind me to show you the scars.
I know that and feel that within my own small world of specialist writing, I think I did “finally arrive”.
But there is another point. When I first reviewed this wonderful song, I recognised that the focus of one’s thinking could be on all the negatives that come from a relationship (or two relationships in my case) that end in court battles, there are still thoughts of hope. And that is what the song has always given me: the hope that no matter how much I have screwed up in terms of relationships, there are still things I got right.
Musically, what makes the song work is that simple rocking alternation of two chords, tilting us back and forth, just like life. The trick of course, is not to avoid the downs, because they are part of life’s experience, but to still be there ready for the ups, when they come along.
With a song as magical as this, it doesn’t matter if some of the lines don’t fit one’s personal situation; what matters is the overall effect, in my case, summed up in the lines
There's a new day at dawn and I've finally arrived If I'm there in the morning, baby, you'll know I've survived I can't believe it, I can't believe I'm alive
I’ve cut the last two lines because they are not relevant to me any more, and besides, at the age of 78 those three lines are enough.
Is this a Dylan song that changed my life? Oh yes, because it made me hold on and continue to believe that I had something to say that maybe a few people would find interesting. And besides, saying it (or as it turned out, writing it) makes me feel a whole lot better.